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40 years after Vietnam's liberation: Okinawa's forgotten war

April 30, 1975: a North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon.

By Jon Mitchell

April 30, 2015 -- Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops and their supporters entered Saigon. Their arrival ended three decades of
conflict -- including 10 years of direct US- intervention -- which left
as many as 3 million dead and countless others suffering from the legacy
of PTSD, unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange.1

As the world remembers this 40th anniversary, all too often forgotten
is the role of the Pentagon’s most important launch pad for this failed
war: Okinawa.

The Vietnam War wrought massive changes on the lives of the island’s
900,000 residents. Many of Okinawa’s current problems date back to this
era and, if the history of the Vietnam War there continues to be
ignored, the island’s wounds -- in many ways as raw as those in South-east
Asia and the US -- will continue to fester long into the future.

* * *

Between 1945 and 1972, Okinawa was under US governance or, as
former US ambassador to Tokyo, Edwin O. Reischauer, stated in 1969,
the island was “a colony of one million Japanese”.2 Few US
officials -- then or since -- have referred so bluntly to the island’s
geopolitical status, however his assessment was entirely accurate. On
Okinawa, the US authorities kept tight control on the media, they
denied passports to those deemed critical of Washington and Okinawans
had no power to elect the person who governed them -- the US High
Commissioner.3

With the island protected by neither the constitutions of the US or
Japan, the Pentagon exploited this limbo by transforming Okinawa into
its Keystone of the Pacific. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, it
stockpiled an unprecedented arsenal of chemical weapons and atomic
warheads there -- and it built more than 80 installations, which
convinced many residents that Okinawa didn’t just have bases, the entire
island was a base.4

The Pentagon had used Okinawa to stage the 1950-53 Korean War but it
was during the Vietnam War that its military build-up truly bore fruit.
The first combat troops to be dispatched to South Vietnam -- including
members of the 3rd Marine Division -- came from Okinawa and, over the
following years, hundreds of thousands more Americans transited through
Okinawa. Tragically, many of those killed in action also passed back
through the island, which hosted some of the military’s mortuary
services.

Kadena Air Base, early 1960s.

US soldiers en route to Vietnam arriving from Hawaii at Kadena, February 1962.

Kadena Air Base served as the Pentagon’s key transport hub. During
the war, it racked up 1 million flights, making it one of the busiest
airports on the planet; starting in 1968, B-52s also took off from the
base to bomb Southeast Asia. In Okinawa’s capital, Naha Port processed
75% of all supplies for the conflict -- including fuel, food and
ammunition. Moreover, the port handled surplus and damaged materiel from
the war zone. A section of nearby Makiminato Service Area, for example,
earned the nickname, “The Bone Yard”, due to its piles of jeeps and
trucks -- many covered in blood and bullet holes -- which had arrived for
repair from Vietnam.5So vital was the island for the
Pentagon that, in 1965, the Commander of US Pacific Forces declared,
“Without Okinawa, we couldn’t continue fighting the Vietnam war.”6

The Pentagon’s war machine required a massive workforce; during the
Vietnam War, approximately 50,000 Okinawans were employed by the US
military.7

Kichi de hataraku (Working on the bases).

In 2013, the Okinawa Times published a book titled Kichi de hataraku
(Working on the bases) in which it compiled interviews with 83 of these
former workers. What comes across most poignantly in many of these
accounts is how deeply embedded Okinawans were in the war effort. At
ammunition depots, they packed explosives and processed faulty
munitions; at Makiminato, they helped to print Vietnamese-language propaganda
flyers for the US Army’s 7th Psychological Operations Group. In the
Northern Training Area (NTA), Okinawans were hired for a dollar a day to
act the enemy in war games played out in mock Vietnamese villages.
Okinawans were also sent to South Vietnam to drive buses within US
bases; others worked -- and were killed -- aboard US ships
transporting supplies in the waters of Vietnam.8

Due to Okinawa’s grey-zone status, base workers tasked with hazardous
tasks were not safeguarded by US or Japanese labour regulations.
These employees handled toxic chemicals without special training,
protective equipment or warnings of the dangers. As a result, hundreds
fell ill from exposure to substances including insecticides, hexavalent
chromium and asbestos.9

During the Vietnam War, Okinawa’s economic situation was bleak so
many residents appreciated base jobs, which were relatively stable and
well paid. Yet for many Okinawans, such labour was accompanied by a
sense of complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Southeast
Asians. This distress was magnified by memories of the spring 1945
Battle of Okinawa in which almost one third of the island’s civilian
population had been slaughtered.

Koza, Okinawa, 1970.

No one better captures Okinawans’ complex emotions to the Vietnam War
than photographer Ishikawa Bunyo. Born in Naha in 1938, Ishikawa
photographed the war between 1965 and 1968 -- and today his images of the
conflict are some of the most famous in Japan.10

Sheltering from a firefight, a US adviser talks into a radio
through his bloodied mouth. Young GIs surround an enemy prisoner --
looking as scared and confused as their captive. A soldier with an M-60
machine gun lies in a field of grass reading a book -- a rare moment of
tranquility in the chaos of combat. Ishikawa’s affinity with his
subjects comes across in many of his images of young Americans.

“Because these US soldiers had been stationed on Okinawa, I felt a
connection with them. In Vietnam, we used to talk about Okinawa’s
neighbourhoods and the bars where we drank. We had a lot in common”,
explains Ishikawa. 11

Ishikawa Bunyo.

So strong was Ishikawa’s feelings for the GIs that, after the war,
he travelled to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington to search for the
names of those he’d photographed among the granite lists of the dead.

During the war, many Okinawans shared Ishikawa’s compassion towards
US troops. Despite residents’ anger with the Pentagon for burdening
their island with so many bases, many people befriended -- and married --
service members. In particular, there was solidarity for those who had
been involuntarily conscripted and African-Americans who, many Okinawans
felt, suffered discrimination from the US authorities which mirrored
their own.

Equally powerful as Ishikawa’s images of combat in Vietnam are those
which he took on Okinawa during the war. He photographed the shot-up
trucks returned via Naha Port, war games in the NTA and fresh recruits
preparing to go to Vietnam.

“Seeing US troops heading to the war gave me very complicated
feelings. On one hand, I didn’t want them to go and kill Vietnamese
people but at the same time, I wanted them to come back safely to
Okinawa”, Ishikawa says. However, when some of these soldiers did return
to Okinawa, they brought the violence of the war back with them.

One of Ishikawa’s most powerful images is called Otto ga korosareta (My husband was killed), which shows the widow of a taxi driver murdered by a GI in October 1971.

Between 1965 and 1975, at least 17 Okinawans were killed by Americans
-- and many more were robbed, raped or assaulted. Most at risk were
those whose work brought them into daily contact with US service
members -- including maids, taxi drivers and bar workers.12

As well as such violence, Okinawans bore the brunt of military
accidents -- including hit-and-run auto accidents and aircraft crashes.
For instance, in June 1965, a trailer dropped by parachute from a plane
over Yomitan crushed an 11-year-old girl to death and in November 1967, a
4-year-old girl was run over and killed by a military crane.

During the Vietnam War, many Okinawans threw their support behind the
reversion movement that sought to return their island to Japanese rule
of law. Especially, they hoped that Japan’s peace constitution would
reduce the number of US bases on Okinawa and curtail their usage for
the conflict in Southeast Asia.

Protest against US base, before Kadena Air Base, March 1971.

On mainland Japan -- as on Okinawa -- the majority of people were
against the war. Surveys revealed overwhelming opposition to the
conflict and, in the late 1960s, millions of mainlanders participated in
demonstrations to express their anger at the war. Beheiren (Japan Peace
for Vietnam Committee), the umbrella movement of loosely affiliated
anti-war groups, included such well-known luminaries as artist Okamoto
Taro and novelist Oe Kenzaburo, who today remains active in the
anti-nuclear movement. 13

Douglas Lummis, a former US marine, became involved in the anti-war
movement in Tokyo in the late 1960s. According to Lummis, what won
Beheiren most attention was the help it afforded US deserters. 14

“Beheiren used to hand out flyers near the US bases around Tokyo
and Kanagawa encouraging GIs to desert. The first four deserters that
Beheiren handled… were at first hidden in a love hotel -- one of the few
places the police couldn’t search.”

According to Lummis, Beheiren put the deserters on the “underground
railroad” -- first traveling by ferry to Hokkaido and then across to the
USSR and eventually to Sweden. However, after being infiltrated, they
began hiding the Americans in Japanese people’s homes.”

In 1971, Lummis traveled to Okinawa where he helped to interpret
during meetings between members of the Okinawan base worker unions and
GI black power groups. “The war crystallised many people’s feelings
against the United States,” explains Lummis.

Although the majority of mainland Japanese opposed the war, unlike on
Okinawa, the conflict did not directly affect their lives. As political
scientist Royama Michio explained in his famous analogy, “Vietnam was a
big fire, but it was a fire on the other side of the river.”15

Richard Nixon and Sato Eisaku, 1972.

In contrast, the Japanese government tacitly backed the war -- in 1965
PM Sato Eisaku declared his “moral support” for the conflict -- and
Japanese corporations, who provided base-building materials and supplies
for US troops, pocketed around $1 billion a year from the fighting.16

Against this backdrop, as the Vietnam War raged from the 1960s into
the ‘70s, the Japanese government entered into negotiations with the
US for the return of Okinawa. At the time, Tokyo pledged to island
residents that reversion would take place under hondo nami -- i.e. the number of US bases on Okinawa would be reduced to a similar level as the mainland.17

Okinawa finally reverted to Japanese control on May 15 1972. But Okinawans soon realised the promise had been broken.

“Although reversion looked like a favour by the US, actually it was
a great deal for the Pentagon -- it could keep using the bases without
needing to pay for them”, says Sato Manabu, professor of political
science at Okinawa International University. “From then on, Japanese
taxpayers footed the bill while the US could continue to use them for
the war with impunity.”

Today, many Okinawans still feel they are suffering the consequences
of that Vietnam War-era betrayal. The island still hosts more than half
of US forces in Japan but their economic contribution to the island
has plummeted from more than 20% during the war, to less than 5%,
according to official prefectural estimates. While curfews and cultural
awareness training have dramatically reduced the number of military
crimes committed against residents (for example 2014 saw a record low of
reported crimes),18 last year Okinawans were given a
frightening reminder of the Vietnam War when barrels containing
suspected military defoliants were uncovered from land which had
previously been part of Kadena Air Base.19

These ongoing problems might explain why the Pentagon’s website to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War -- vietnamwar50th.com
-- contains zero references to Okinawa. Likewise a request for comment
from USMC on Okinawa resulted in a stock response which made no mention
of the island. 20

Such reluctance to recognise the role of Okinawa in the Vietnam war
is best understood by a visit to two of the installations central to
Pentagon war efforts: the Northern Training Area (NTA), where Okinawans
were paid a dollar a day for war games, and Camp Schwab, former storage
site for nuclear warheads and, according to many seriously ill US
veterans, Agent Orange.21

Despite overwhelming public opposition, today there are plans to expand both bases.

Alongside the NTA, for the past eight years, local residents have
been demonstrating against the construction of Pentagon helipads, which,
they argue, threaten the safety of their community. Meanwhile near Camp
Schwab, Okinawans have been engaged in an 18-year struggle against a new
US base. This base plan was conceived by Washington in the mid-1960s,
but later it was shelved due to the cost; now it has been resurrected
as a mega-base replete with twin 1800-metre runways and a deep-sea port -- all
built atop one of Japan’s sole-surviving coral reefs.22

Camp Schwab.

Unlike the previous bases used in the Vietnam War, these new projects
are being constructed by Tokyo with Japanese tax money; further proof,
according to many Okinawans, that the hondo nami promise of reversion
was indeed betrayed.

Today many of those opposing the new bases can recall firsthand how
Okinawa was used during the Vietnam War -- and they vow not to let their
island be exploited in such a way again.

One of these is Shimabukuro Fumiko -- one of the participants in the
current sit-in outside Camp Schwab. During the 1960s, Shimabukuro worked
as a maid on the installation -- but the Pentagon’s aggression in
Southeast Asia filled her with such a sense of complicity that she quit.

Photographer Ishikawa is an equally adamant opponent of the planned installation. “If the new base is built, it will be used for future wars. Nothing
has really changed since the Vietnam War -- Okinawa is still being used
by the US military”, says Ishikawa.

Former Marine Lummis, now a resident of Okinawa, believes it is vital now more than ever to remember the lessons of the war. “Today many young people don’t know there even was a war in Vietnam --
and those that do remember haven’t grasped that the US lost that war --
and almost every war since. The Japanese government insists that Japan
should stick with the US for its defense -- but we need to rethink what
power really is.”

[Welsh journalist, Jon Mitchell, is the author of Tsuiseki: Okinawa no Karehazai (Chasing
Agent Orange on Okinawa) (Koubunken 2014) and a visiting researcher at
the International Peace Research Institute of Meiji Gakuin University,
Tokyo. Mitchell is an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor.]

1. One of the best primers on the US involvement in Vietnam is Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves, (New York : Metropolitan Books 2013).

2. Quoted in Thomas R.H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan 1965-1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 193.

3. Some of the best discussions (in English) of Okinawa’s 1945~1972 period appear in Gavan McCormack and Satoko Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. 2012)